1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of indexing. More specifically, the present invention is related to indexing JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) documents.
2. Discussion of Related Art
JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format. It is based on a subset of the JavaScript Programming language. More and more web-based applications exchange and/or store information in JSON format. Indexing and searching JSON data are critical for those applications.
JSON is built on two structures: (1) a collection of name/value pairs; and (2) an ordered list of values. The formal definition of a JSON value is given below.
value::= object | array | atomobject::= (field : value)*array::= (value)*atom::= string | number | true | false | nullfield::= string
For example, the following is a valid JSON object. By convention, objects are enclosed within “{ }” and arrays are encloses within “[ ]”. Also, strings are quoted and numbers are not quoted. It is important to understand that field names are unique within an object.
{ firstName: “John”, lastName: “Smith”, address: {  streetAddress: “21 2nd Street”,  city: “New York”,  state: “NY”,  postalCode: 10021 }, phoneNumbers: [  “212 732-1234”,  “646 123-4567” ]}
Embodiments of the present invention are an improvement over prior art JSON indexing and searching methods.